Ripple Foundation is partnering with the Discovery Data Service (DDS) and driving success for the NHS by transforming digital healthcare and contributing to the interoperability agenda. The cultural fit of working collaboratively with open source solutions has allowed the development and delivery of innovative solutions.

The DDS uses a publish and subscribe model. Subscribers are health and care organisations who express an interest in accessing a subset of data for a particular purpose. Publishers are health and care provider organisations who control their data and agree to publish their data once, in a way that can be accessed by many subscribers. Only systems can interact with the data service; users do not directly interact with the service and can only obtain data through the system(s) of their choice.

Regionally based data sharing agreements match multiple publishers to one or more subscribers for particular pre-agreed purposes. Data cannot be provided without adherence to a set of rules derived from the data sharing agreement. The data service receives data from a number of publisher systems; the data is either sent automatically or transmitted on request by the service. The data within the service remains under the direct control of the data controllers with each item of data stamped by the data controller. The data is then converted to a common format that is directly compatible with FHIR and Snomed-CT. Depending on the data sharing rules, prior to transmission, the service links the data at a patient level by NHS number. A subset of the data, for example a cohort of patients, is then made available to subscriber systems. Data is provided either in an identifiable form for direct care, or is de-identified for secondary uses, depending on the agreement. Person level consent is managed according to GDPR and Caldicott policies.

The DDS team is working with the Ripple Foundation to deliver patient level data from a single source, in order to populate the Helm Patient Portal.

https://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/DDS_text.jpg250689Phil Barretthttps://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/header-icon300.pngPhil Barrett2019-02-14 14:56:042019-02-19 11:03:10Our work with the Discovery Data Service team

Hello and welcome to our Digital Commons Academy, a set of open access videos, which you are free to use and and share with colleagues.

At Ripple Foundation we appreciate that digital advancement in health and care is complex so we’ve broken down the issues into a series of short but thorough videos for you to explore. Our hope is that by watching the films on your own or as part of training within a team we can help to share our learning with you.

Each film is less than 5 minutes and covers a range of topics including clinical leadership, implementing change and the state of the current market place. We hope that they provide you with information and raise discussions for you to debate as a team, board or organisation. Full list of videos is available here or on vimeo.

We are a non-profit making organisation that was established a few years ago to support the adoption of an open platform for health and care. We believe that the future of digital health and care is not one single technology firm providing all the solutions but a vendor neutral market place where organisations large or small can compete fairly because they are developing solutions that meet a set of open standards in pursuit of an open platform.

We hope you enjoy the topics covered and please do get in touch with your feedback – we are always learning and developing at Ripple Foundation so we welcome your views.

It was a great pleasure to meet the Health Secretary on his recent visit to Leeds after launching his new “tech vision” for the health service. I met Matt Hancock MP at the ODI in the centre of Leeds on Friday 19 October 2018 and talked him through our development for Helm – an open platform solution for a person held record.

I was able to share with him the UI/UX experience of Helm as it looks right now and was pleased to hear very positive responses both from the Health Secretary and his Chief Technology Advisor, Hadley Beeman. Helm has been in development for a number of months to ensure that we’ve got strong foundations for people accessing and contributing to their own health and wellbeing information. It has involved passionate work from a number of highly experienced technical people as well as clinically direction from Dr Tony Shannon, along with strong creative development from Simon Gamester.

Helm benefits from a number of innovative technologies supported by Ripple Foundation, namely, PulseTile, QEWD.js and EtherCIS and is underpinned by the internationally leading open standard for healthcare, openEHR. It also conforms to the well received paper “Defining an Open Platform” by Apperta Foundation.

The exciting journey of Helm being tested by people in Leeds starts very shortly. People are at the heart of this product and they will now lead the way in its future development. Users of Helm will be able to tell us what works and what doesn’t, what would be useful, what is missing and Ripple Foundation is very excited to be a large part of this new innovation with the city of Leeds, led by Leeds City Council. The plans for Helm are for rapid expansion into the Yorkshire and Humber region. We will keep posting news on the Ripple Foundation website but do get in touch if you would like to understand more about our open platform approach for addressing some of the issues faced by Health IT.

Thank you to ODI Leeds for supplying the photos taken during the session with the Health Secretary.

Ripple Foundation is delighted to announce we have been officially approved as a supplier for cloud support on the UK government framework called G-Cloud 10. It is a national framework that shares the agreement between the government and suppliers who provide cloud-based services.

To be accepted onto G-Cloud framework we have provided information about the company and the way we work, we also added information about the services we offer.

Phil Barrett, Director at Ripple Foundation said, “Our open source and open standards based work within Ripple Foundation is very well aligned to the GDS design standards so this is a natural fit for us. To be on the G-Cloud framework is an important step in the UK market by removing perceived barriers to procuring services and further realising our mission for the adoption of an open platform in health and care. We support three open source technologies with our open standards based approach:

a leading edge UX/UI framework in both Angular.js and React.js – PulseTile.

For further information about the Ripple Foundation please contact info@ripple.foundation.

ENDS

Ripple Foundation is a community interest company that is supporting the adoption of an open health and care platform. It is a clinically led team that working with communities to support using an integrated digital care platform for today and the future. Open source, open standards and underpinned by an open architecture that can be used worldwide.

For media enquiries about Ripple, please contact info@ripple.foundation or visit the website for more information www.ripple.foundation

https://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/G-Cloud10image.png183275Rebecca Nichellshttps://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/header-icon300.pngRebecca Nichells2018-07-03 08:04:562018-07-03 08:05:19Delighted to announce we are now on the G-Cloud 10 framework for Cloud Support

We are proud to be supporting Yorkshire and Humber’s successful bid to become a Local Health and Care Record Exemplar with our technical solution for a Person Held Record called Helm. This is a credit to their national and international leadership in this field and a sign of a change in the health IT marketplace.

The delivery of an open standards and open platform based person held record was originally supported by the city of Leeds thanks to the leadership of Dylan Roberts, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Leeds City Council, but will now be made available to the geographical footprint that makes up Yorkshire and Humber, involving over 70 organisations. It is also being discussed in other Local Integrated Care Record Exemplar areas including Greater Manchester with Salford Royal GDE moving to explore the technology.

The benefits of supporting an open platform approach allows Helm to be built in such a way so that it will becomes accessible across geographies and care providers regardless of the clinical system in use.

Helm puts users in control of their own health and care data by allowing them to view and add to key information, starting with medical data and growing to include wider public services. For the first time, the public will be able to see and interact with their own records and data on an easy to use, secure, online platform that encourages them to take control of their own health and wellbeing. Helm reflects this new position with a “Take Control, Take the Helm” strapline and call to action.

Dr Tony Shannon, Director at Ripple Foundation added, “Over the past few months we’ve noticed a real shift in emphasis within the Health IT sector towards adopting an open platform with open standards. At Ripple Foundation we truly believe this is the only way to stop the mediocrity of an underperforming health IT sector. By building Helm on an open platform, in line with the international openEHR standard, we are working to support a transformative move to future proof healthcare IT systems.

Tony continued, “Ripple Foundation’s mission is to improve the care of patients and citizens alike by providing technology that supports their needs and delivers easy to use systems that are scalable and cost effective.”

Helm will adopt the Ripple Foundation’s showcase stack which can be broken into three levels:

PulseTile – leading edge UX/UI framework developed by Ripple Foundation

Each component harnesses the power of open source and aims to demonstrate open standards in action to show that there is a different way to provide technology into the health and care systems and ultimately to the users of Helm.

For further information about the Helm and open platform technology please contact info@ripple.foundation.

ENDS

Ripple Foundation is a community interest company that is supporting the adoption of an open health and care platform. It is a clinically led team that working with communities to support using an integrated digital care platform for today and the future. Open source, open standards and underpinned by an open architecture that can be used worldwide.

For media enquiries about Ripple Foundation, please contact info@ripple.foundation or visit the website for more information www.ripple.foundation

https://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Helm-logo_RGB_with-strapline.png564763Rebecca Nichellshttps://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/header-icon300.pngRebecca Nichells2018-06-28 07:54:482018-06-28 07:54:48Proud to be supporting Helm across the Yorkshire and Humber Region

EtherCIS Clinical Data Repository is developing at pace with radical new improvements in its latest V1.2 release including enhanced security, more complex querying, federation, improved configuration capabilities and much more. EtherCIS is the leading open source implementation of the openEHR standard in action (including AQL support) and these new developments make the use of EtherCIS even more compelling in the marketplace.

EtherCIS development is supported by the non profit Ripple Foundation and is a key component of their “showcase stack” and work towards an open platform in healthcare. It is led by Christian Chevalley of ADOC Software Development who said, “We’re thrilled with the latest release of EtherCIS and proud that our work combines contributions by the community across the globe. It is helping Health IT to become sustainable, open, vendor neutral and delivers patient centered clinical data handling with knowledge engineering. Helping to deliver this message to key decision makers and leaders has been part of Ripple Foundation’s mission and we are excited to be part of the action.”

Dr Tony Shannon, Director of Ripple Foundation said, “We welcome the work that Christian and his company is continuing to deliver for EtherCIS, it’s a great achievement and really helps to ensure that open platforms are the future of Health IT. We are also thankfully that cities like Leeds in Britain are implementing EtherCIS in their area for Helm, the adoption of an open platform Person Held Record. EtherCIS is helping to contribute to the global endeavour of improving data quality, access, storage and research which is fit for 21st Century care.”

EtherCIS upgrade ensures sensitive data is further protected against eavesdropping and it controls access to the database, so users can only access the data they have been authorised to see.

Enhanced openEHR querying (AQL)

Users can now perform more complex querying due to new enhancements using openEHR templates for meta data. The openEHR standard has been adopted and implemented across healthcare systems throughout the world, representing the future of health IT.

Federation

Improved federation which allows information retrieval technology to simultaneously search in multiple resources. This means that a user can make a single query request which is then distributed to the search engines, databases or other query engines participating in the federation.

More configuration capabilities

EtherCIS REST server now supports a full set of parameters for basic HTTP, SSL, low resource monitoring and request logging.

Under the hood improvements

There has been an upgrade to a number of critical components including REST server, DB programmatic interface and XML handling. EtherCIS libraries have been cleaned up and simplified to reduce dependency conflicts and many unit tests have been finalised

Ripple Foundation is a community interest company that is supporting the adoption of an open health and care platform. It is a clinically led team that working with communities to support using an integrated digital care platform for today and the future. Open source, open standards and underpinned by an open architecture that can be used worldwide.

Developments in recent months have brought the leading work of QEWD.js to even greater heights. Three key areas bring the technology led by Rob Tweed of M/Gateway Ltd bang up to date in the refactoring of the Ripple-QEWD solution:

Shift towards a microservices based architecture

Leveraging the power of JSON Web Tokens (JWT) to secure the technology

The Dockerisation of the solution to enable ease of install for this powerful technology

QEWD.js is a lightweight yet very powerful open source technology. The recent improvements make it even more appealing and central to Ripple Foundation’s open platform adoption mission.

For more information about QEWD.js and the QEWD-Ripple microservices infrastructure please check out these links:

Ripple Foundation is proud to introduce PulseTile – transforming usability with a clinically led UX/UI framework to support 21st Century care.

Ripple Foundation is aiming for PulseTile to be one of the most useful UX/UI frameworks in healthcare. PulseTile is the user interface that sits within the showcase stack that Ripple Foundation is promoting as part of its vision for supporting the adoption of an open health and care platform.

PulseTile is transforming usability because the clinically led user designed interface is easy to use – freeing up time for frontline health and care professionals in their day to day work. Designed with the user in mind, it ultimately allows clinicians to spend more time looking at their patients in the eye instead of inputting data into a clunky IT system. PulseTile is open source, modular and abides to open standards which allows for flexbility and scalability, can be used and shared across the world.

PulseTile has been crafted over the past couple of years by a clinical and technical group from across the globe. Learning was gathered from many previous health IT projects ensuring you get the best engineered user interface in the development of PulseTile.

Ripple Foundation have created five reasons why they believe that PulseTile should be the UX/UI framework of clinical choice:

Clinically Led – Healthcare needs change. Clinicians must lead that change.

Open Source – Healthcare is open. We’re sharing our code with the world.

Dr Tony Shannon, Director of Ripple Foundation and clinical lead of PulseTile said, “I’m proud we’re able to launch PulseTile to the world. PulseTile can be traced back to the challenges of working as a Consultant in busy Emergency Departments in the UK and USA. On every busy shift, one key issue, time and again was the need for better usability in healthcare information systems – hence the push towards a UI/UX framework that you would simply want to use. PulseTile fulfills this gap and is fit for the highly complex modern day health and care system.

“If you combine PulseTile with the rest of Ripple Foundation’s supported showcase stack – QewdJS and EtherCIS – they offer the basis of an open platform that can be used across the world – large or small scale. Being modular, the flexibility is yours – please use it, get involved, build upon it and share the learnings”, continued Tony.

Leeds is leading the way in developing and piloting an open platform based Person Held Record (PHR) for local people. It follows extensive engagement with individuals, care professionals and stakeholders across the city to understand their needs and aspirations. It is believed a PHR will help people to better manage and control their own care and wellbeing and help prevent further health issues.

The PHR programme will be led by Leeds City Council in partnership with NHS organisations across the city. The technology will be built on an internationally leading open source platform for the health and care sector, developed in Leeds by the Ripple Foundation. Leeds’ philosophy around digital technology of simplify, standardise and share allows flexibility and scalability with the intention to share easily with others across the nation.

Phase one will enable people to register, verify their identity and log into their PHR. It will let people contribute and update information about themselves, for example, a top three things to know about me. It will also integrate with the Leeds Care Record that is widely used by care professionals across the city.

Councillor Rebecca Charlwood, Chair of the Leeds Health and Wellbeing Board said, “Leeds is the second largest city in the UK outside London, with a diverse population of over 770,000 people. We need to nurture a health and care system where people have more conversations and opportunities to help unlock the best solutions for them. The Person Held Record programme is a key enabler of this work.”

“The city of Leeds has the skills and ability to create cutting edge technology for its citizens. The decision to develop a Person Held Record is another clear example”, said Dylan Roberts, chief digital and information officer for Leeds City Council. “We will work closely with the people of Leeds, care professionals and national organisations to ensure any technology we build and implement can be reused across the nation.”

Dr Jason Broch, GP partner at Oakwood Lane Medical Practice and Chair of the Leeds Informatics Board said, “Patients need to access their record to allow them to understand their health and wellbeing better and input their own information to take a more active role. It is the missing piece of the jigsaw towards truly integrated care. In Leeds we believe a Person Held Record will be central to this change.”

Leeds is also hoping the market will help create apps and functionality that will work with the open platform because they conform to the standards set. For example, if you have a chronic long term condition, you will be able to personalise your PHR with this information, allowing for a more joined up view.

Dr Tony Shannon, Director at Ripple Foundation added, “Healthcare is suffering from an underperforming health IT sector which makes it harder for care professionals to work with their patients efficiently and effectively. By building their Person Held Record on an open platform, in line with the international open EHR standard, Leeds has started a transformational move to future proof its healthcare IT systems.

Tony continued, “Ripple Foundation’s mission is to improve the care of patients and citizens alike by providing technology that supports their needs and delivers easy to use systems that are scalable and cost effective.”

For further information about the Person Held Record in Leeds please contact dylan.roberts@leeds.gov.uk If you are interested in the technology of an open platform please contact info@ripple.foundation

https://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/aaron-burden-329406.jpg34484592Ripple Foundationhttps://ripple.foundation/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/header-icon300.pngRipple Foundation2017-10-05 15:13:562017-10-05 15:17:35Leeds trail blazing with an open platform Person Held Record